


All The Wrong He Hadn't Done

by Jenni_Snake



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Drift Side Effects, Established Relationship, Guilt, M/M, Mental Institutions, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-07 13:33:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1120432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenni_Snake/pseuds/Jenni_Snake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of the drift, Newt tries to keep Hermann from losing his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All The Wrong He Hadn't Done

Belmont was far enough from Boston that it seemed to be another world. The autumnal New England colours were muted behind the fog, reds and oranges obscured and dull as rust. Newt pulled the keys out of the ignition, but didn’t get out of the car. He stared at the featureless brick wall through the windshield a moment more, then pressed his eyes closed, trying to get up enough courage to walk into the building in front of him. Looking at himself in the rearview mirror, he forced a smile onto his face, and let it drop. With each visit, it was becoming harder to stay optimistic. After a final moment's vacillation, he heaved himself out of the car, pushed the door shut and dragged his feet up the steps.

As usual, he found Hermann sitting on the neatly-made bed in his room, looking out the window at the watercolour vista with a serene smile on his face, tilting his cane back and forth between his knees. When Newt clicked the door shut Hermann turned to him and held out his hand. As always, Newt could see the same puffiness around his bloodshot eyes as he took his hand and leaned down to meet his kiss. The grey in Hermann’s hair was even more pronounced than during his last visit, but Newt wondered if Hermann even noticed.

He took a place next to him, and they folded their hands over each other’s.

\---

“I’m sorry!” Hermann cried, clasping his arms around Newt’s neck, eyes clenched shut. Guilt coated his voice, but Newt couldn’t understand it where it had come from.

Not an hour before they were jubilant, surrounded by the joy of rest of the world, celebrating the end to the conflict that had threatened, for twelve tiring years, to wipe them out. Hermann had cheered and embraced him with unrestrained glee. His euphoria was what had led them to where they were now, alone together, half-naked, hands all over each other, their kisses just different enough from mere hours before, closer, and without the edge of desperation that everything during the war had carried with it. They were free now to linger over each other, knowing that forever had no timeline.

Straddled over Hermann, absorbed in their kiss, Newt felt the change. He smirked as he realized he was the only one doing any work, but, pulling away, was indignant at finding Hermann asleep.

“Doing wonders for my self confidence, Hermann,” he grumbled.

It was only then that he noticed something odd. Even though he had just fallen asleep, Hermann’s eyes were moving beneath his eyelids like he was dreaming, and his body was tensing and shaking. He thrashed his head from side to side, and held his hands out in front of him, whispering _no!_ against some invisible enemy. Newt shook him by the shoulders, calling his name to bring him out of it, but Hermann couldn’t hear. Tears started to fall from his closed eyes, and his breathing caught itself up into sobbing.

“I’m sorry - I’m so, so sorry,” Hermann kept repeating. There was nothing Newt could do but try to soothe him, cleaving Hermann to himself, letting him cry while he stroked his back.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, hoping some part of him could hear, but Hermann still convulsed in sobs. It was as if he couldn’t tell that anyone was there with him, he was lost in his own world. It seemed like an eternity until he had cried himself out, and then all he could do was sleep.

It took a while for Newt to calm himself down, even as he stroked Hermann’s side while he slept, but he couldn’t fall asleep right away. He stared through the dark, not knowing what had just happened, or what Hermann was apologizing for, or even who he was apologizing to. He chided himself as he imagined ridiculous things that Hermann might have done, other lives Hermann might have led that he had kept from him, things he hadn’t shared. Newt wondered why he wasn’t deserving of Hermann’s trust and he begrudged him it for a fleeting moment. In the next, he hated himself for even considering it as he shook the thought from his head - confidence and trust were essential to drift, and their recent success had proven in a very tangible way that they shared both, even if their relationship had been proving it for years.

There still remained the question, then, of what had happened to Hermann. Newt wracked his brain for other possible explanations, but came up empty handed. He found himself trembling slightly as he enveloped Hermann and rested his cheek on his hair. In the end exhaustion overcame his worry, and he dozed off in the early hours of the morning.

\---

When Newt cautiously brought it up the next day, Hermann couldn’t remember a thing.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asked, concerned at seeing the anxiety etched in the lines of Newt’s features.

Newt blinked at him a few times, not knowing what to say. He bit his lip, unable to shake the picture of how broken down Hermann had been the night before.

Hermann cupped Newt’s cheek in his hand. “Darling?”

Taking Hermann’s hand in both of his own, Newt smiled at the warmth, and was put at ease. He started to remember what Hermann had done as a nightmare, something strange and out of character, but transient.

“It’s nothing, don’t worry,” he said, kissing Hermann’s palm, glad that it was all over.

Until later that day, when it happened again.

The mess food had been noticeably worse than usual, and Hermann didn’t bother to wait until they were back in their quarters to start complaining that everyone still had a job to do, and that meant the kitchen staff as well. Newt joked that maybe they hadn’t heard the war was over, or didn’t believe it, or were saving something for a huge celebration on the weekend once everyone had recovered from their partying the night before, especially since more than a few people had carried it into today. He found himself babbling on a tangent about a college dorm party he’d once been to that had lasted three days, and didn’t notice that he was still talking as he closed the door to their room.

“I’m sorry,” Hermann choked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Newt said, flipping the lock, “everyone’s feeling a bit off-kilter - ”

He only stopped talking when he turned around, just in time to catch Hermann falling halfway to the ground. Panic seized him, and he tried to shake Hermann conscious from the half-waking stupor that had taken hold of him. Nothing would bring him out of the fit, so Newt just sunk down with him as he went to pieces in his arms, and let his own tears mix with Hermann’s, waiting it out, then dragging him to bed.

Although none of the previous incidents had made an impression on Hermann, it happened again the next day, this time in the lab. Despite the lost time, Hermann was still cavalier about it, and Newt was too shaken up to argue. The day after that it happened just before they headed to breakfast. When Hermann came back to himself, more quickly than before, he found Newt in such a state of distress that he could no longer dismiss his episodes out of hand, and conceded to visit the medical clinic. The staff there had little to offer but sedatives, which Hermann refused as useless, but Newt accepted with thanks.

“Newton,” Hermann grumbled in frustration, as he shuffled from the medbay with Newt’s hand on his back, “these aren’t going to help. I don’t know when these fits are going to happen so how can I even use them?”

“I don’t know,” Newt said, “but it’s the only thing we’ve got.”

Hermann was about to correct him for using the plural possessive, but bit his tongue as he caught sight of the tiredness in Newt’s eyes and the strain on his face.

For the next two weeks, there was hardly a moment when Newt wasn’t at Hermann’s side. It was only after the next few incidents that Hermann started to recall bits of what had happened when he blacked out. At first he was able only to ask Newt if it had happened again before falling asleep. Then he could stay awake a bit longer, and was baffled to feel the tears on his face. Finally, he started recalling bits of what he had seen.

Bored from filling out his fifth nearly-identical faculty application for another university in the downtime he had during the Shatterdome decommission, Newt let out a breath and sat back in his chair. Out of the corner of his eye he caught Hermann in an odd position and did a double take, then rushed to his side. Hermann was sitting on his knees on the floor in front of his chalkboards, hand still on his cane at his temple, staring into nothingness. His face was as white as a sheet, and he was was breathing unsteadily.

“Hermann, what is it?” asked Newt, crouching down next to him, afraid to touch him.

Without taking his eyes off the invisible spot, Hermann swallowed, and the expression on his face turned to grief.

“Is that what really happens?” he whispered, reaching his hand out into the air in front of him. “Do people just fall like that? From bridges?”

When Newt had helped him up and got him a cup of hot tea, Hermann explained what he had seen: K-day, the Golden Gate Bridge, cars like tiny scale models, and the one thing his memory played over and over, a single person, arms flailing but as small as an ant, falling two-hundred feet into the water below.

Bit by bit, episode after episode, they started to piece together what Hermann was seeing. By the end of the month, they estimated that he had relived, in bits and pieces, four separate kaiju attacks. His nightmares preyed on him night or day, sometimes replaying the same incident, sometimes revealing new details. He related how dream-like it all seemed, practically soundless, except for the screeching of bent metal, or the white noise of the ocean. It took Newt quite a while to understand that Hermann wasn’t seeing the attacks from the point of view of the victims, but as the perpetrator. Slowly it dawned on him that Hermann believed himself to be killing every one of the hundreds of thousands of people who died.

Newt tried to talk Hermann through it, explaining that the memories weren’t his, that the acts weren’t his, that he had no reason to feel responsible for the things that he was seeing. Hermann replied at first by scoffing at his help, then by pointedly ignoring him. After a while, he was just too tired to react, and Newt fell silent, too.

They sought help from the doctors, but the incident was beyond their experience, and all they could do was prescribe more sedatives. Hermann began to take them regularly, and his work started to suffer. When he started to notice, it frustrated him, and he exploded at any little thing. He was prickly towards the LOCCENT officers when they came to bother him to sign off on reports, but Newt shrugged it off as being par for the course. After he snapped at the Commander, Newt was taken aback. He shared a look of bemusement with Tendo, but neither of them said anything to the other, and certainly not to Hermann.

It was when Hermann lost control and exploded at the Marshal with little regret and even less awareness that Newt cringed. Leaving Hermann stewing furiously over his work, Herc pulled Newt aside. Newt explained what had been happening, as far as they knew, and detailed the past few weeks that had felt like months, the involvement of the medical team, the ever increasing dosage of sedatives. He faltered when trying to explain exactly what went on when Hermann was overtaken by the visions, and had to stop to take his glasses off and press his thumb and forefinger over his eyes. Herc put a hand on his shoulder.

There was nothing he could offer, even from his years of drift experience, but he guaranteed him that whatever was needed to help keep Hermann sane there was no question that it would be at their disposal. Even with the promise, Newt was disheartened by the look of patient tolerance Herc wore each time he spoke to Hermann, but more by the look of sorrow that troubled him when he left.

What troubled Newt more was when the outbursts stopped. Hermann started to move with more difficulty, as if he lacked the motivation to be anywhere other than where he was. Even sitting completely still, Newt could see that he was hunched over from the weight of what he was carrying.

In a vain effort to do something useful, Newt had begun to keep notes on Hermann’s condition, diligently recording the times and durations of the memories that were lodged in his mind. When Hermann wasn’t watching, Newt would pore over the data he had collected, in a fruitless and frustrating effort to find a trigger in the sights, sounds, even smells that preceded each memory. He pulled his hair out trying to make any connection whatsoever to prevent what was happening to him.

There was one day where, towards afternoon, Newt had realized that nothing had happened since the previous morning. The anomaly of having gone for well over twenty-four hours without an incident gave him a momentary surge of optimism. He tried to revel in it as evening neared, but as he crawled in next to an already sleeping Hermann that night, his skepticism that had turned to pessimism over the course of the day settled in as melancholy. Everything in his training persisted in reminding him that anomalies happen all the time, and the data point just needs to be thrown out. He lay against Hermann’s back, pressing as much of himself over the warm smoothness of his skin. Before he fell asleep the thought crept into his mind that this was as together as they might ever be again, and he embraced Hermann even more tightly.

\---

McLean had been the top psychiatric hospital in the country even before the technology of drifting created problems that the best researchers couldn’t have imagined. Their work on the aftereffects of neural sharing was second to none, and its proximity to MIT, which had enthusiastically welcomed back the world’s foremost xenobiologist as their own, made it a natural choice.

But it still hadn’t made it easy. Hermann began as an outpatient, but when the episodes continued to worsen, and as he became less and less able to cope with them and with everyday reality, his stays became longer and longer, until he was eventually admitted on a permanent basis. Even with a treatment regimen and ongoing supervision, Hermann was soon judged incapable of making decisions for himself, and the responsibility fell to Newt. At the outset of the decline, the doctors had approached Hermann’s condition with a wait-and-see attitude, going over procedures with Newt for his eventual reintegration into society, back into the life he knew. But hope had started to fade.

There were endless discussions and sessions with psychologists and psychiatrists. Everything Newt had learned about memory made him doubt his own sanity and perception of reality. He had had so many conversations that they all seemed like one.

“We do know he has been having memories that couldn't possibly be his. He’s convinced that he once fell out of a tree and broke his leg.”

“Is that why he needs a cane?” Newt asked simply, trying to remember why Hermann hadn't told him about it.

The doctor stared at him, but in a show of professional diplomacy tried to temper the incredulity in her voice.

“It is mild, but he has had spastic diplegia in both his legs from birth."

“I should have known that,” muttered Newt, blushing.

“He’s never had the ability to have done some of the things he remembers,” the doctor explained. “They’re your memories.”

Newt surprised himself as he remembered the time he had taken his cousin up on that dare and slipped on the wet branch. His aunt had been nearly as furious as his mother, and all the tears in the world wouldn’t get him an ounce of sympathy. He was perplexed - he hadn’t thought of it in years, but it came back as naturally as he knew his name - but try as he might, he couldn’t remember even a fraction of the kaiju attacks from the drift as Hermann had.

“Why is he getting the memories but I’m not?”

“From my conversations with both of you, I’ve determined that they were subconsciously transferred. That is, neither of you were experiencing them consciously as part of the drift.

“Likely, you never stored those memories, and so your brain doesn’t have access to them, involuntarily or not. They’re just not there.

“And to complicate matters, shared memories can be interpreted in different ways by different individuals. Sight, sound, smell - the senses might be reproduced with near-authenticity, but related emotions are not _necessarily_ held in-common. Hermann’s reactions to falling out of the tree were surprise and amusement, which are likely not what you remember. Where you have told me that your experience of kaiju attacks were to feel a sense of motivated destruction and single mindedness, what he feels is intense guilt and remorse. He’s not living them as the original memory-holder did, but as if he, as a human, was the originator of the attacks.”

There was an experimental drug treatment that they had consented to try, the use of fenol-mexyl-doxanthrine that Newt had remembered them saying acted on the D1 dopamine receptor as a full agonist.

“In that way, it keeps the memories from triggering the associated emotional responses,” it had been explained to him. “There is a drawback, of course. It only works on memories he’s already experienced, the ones that recur. But there are are possibly years of unaccessed memories that he’s carrying around - like lost film footage that keeps cropping up. And remember, the first attack lasted sixteen days. He’s not seen the half of it.”

The snippets played over and over in Newt’s head, tempered somewhat by distance, fading as he drove away each day, intensifying as he drove back the next.

“What’s strange is that we’ve not had a case this bad in recent memory. It’s not just the intensity, but the type. In 2016 we had the testimony of cadets coming in almost every week, recalling incidents that had never happened to them even months after their one-off drift training. After that, the external pons models carried a cortical buffer to help reduce the problem of memory transfer.”

“I didn’t know that,” Newt said quietly, defending himself to himself.

\---

“I love the feel of your hands,” Hermann said, bringing Newt away from his own memories and back to the present. They had been sitting in silence the whole time. “I’ve missed you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“It’s been so long since I last saw you.”

“I was here yesterday.”

“Were you?”

Newt couldn’t help himself and the lump that had risen from his chest to his throat erupted in tears.

“Newton, my darling, what’s wrong?”

“Stop it!” he exploded. “Stop it, Hermann! Stop pretending that everything’s okay and that you don’t know that I’m the reason you’re here, the reason that it’s been _fifteen years_ and there’s still nothing they can do for you!”

The bewildered look on Hermann’s face reminded Newt that he had no way to process what he was saying or why he was yelling, and his hand started trembling. Steadying himself, Newt took Hermann’s hand again. He brushed the tears from his cheeks quickly, and sniffled, blinking back any lingering self-pity. His eyes skimmed the room, looking for some distraction, and landed on Hermann’s notebook.

“Can I take a look at what you’ve been working on.”

“If you’d like,” Hermann shrugged, smiling demurely, displaying what Newt would have once thought of as uncharacteristic modesty.

Newt looked at the scribbling and forced himself to close the notebook carefully instead of banging it shut. He knew enough about Hermann’s field to know that the equations and conclusions he had been writing since his time at McLean were becoming more and more nonsensical. It looked as though someone were diligently filling in simple crosswords with invented words that seemed correct to them. But there was little else for Hermann to do to keep himself occupied in his more lucid hours. And there was little comfort in knowing that what he didn’t know wasn’t harming him.

“Come sit close to me,” Hermann said when Newt put the book squarely back in its place.

As Newt sat back down on the bed, Hermann moved himself closer so that their thighs were touching. He ran his thumb over the creases at the corners of Newt’s eyes with a small laugh. Then he dragged his fingers through Newt’s hair once, twice, then rested his hand on the back of his neck. He pulled him in for a light kiss, then another which grew longer and deeper, then faded. Even as their lips parted they remained only a breath apart.

“I miss you,” Hermann said quietly.

He dragged Newt’s hand to the front of his pants to press it over his erection, and Newt winced and closed his eyes. He tried to pull his hand away, but Hermann insisted, and he gave in, partly to humour him, partly to indulge himself for one more sweet second.

“We can't,” Newt said quietly.

“ _Please._ ” The longing in Hermann’s whisper, the heat flushing his cheeks and forehead, made it difficult for Newt not to give in.

“I'm sorry.”

In the stifling silence, they sat awkwardly, listening to the clock ticking the seconds until their visit was over, so routine that the nurses no longer had to knock at the door.

“I love you,” Hermann said as Newt kissed him on the forehead when he got up to leave.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” Newt replied, squeezing Hermann's hand gently before releasing it. “I love you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this after a prompt on the kinkmeme: _I want a guilty, broken, and sobbing Hermann. That is all._ But it seems nothing I write turns out very sexy, but can't help becoming angst-ridden.
> 
> Also, the PTSD drug was half-invented, though the [research is real](http://bbrfoundation.org/discoveries/blocking-the-recall-of-memory-for-treatment-of-post-traumatic-stress-disorder).


End file.
